Mass customization is a paradigm which is being recognized as a means to achieve a competitive advantage. Among the first industries to adopt the new paradigm of mass customization were producers of consumer goods, which needed to differentiate their products from those of their competitors by tailoring their products to the customers' demands.
Following the success of earlier mass producers adopting the mass customization paradigm, a number of different industries also embraced mass customization as a business strategy. Among these industries were several companies within the engineer-to-order sector which recognized that the tools and methods from mass customization could be utilized to improve fit with customer demands.
In some cases, however, large scale engineer-to-order production systems of complicated products (e.g. commercial airplanes) present unique concerns. For example, such production systems typically involve the integration of a variety of different processes by a variety of different parties (e.g. system integrator, partners, suppliers, product designers, custom feature configures, etc.) having different lead times and learning curves. Such large scale customization production systems may therefore contain dynamic, unequally distributed lead times and improvement rates, making it very difficult to statistically predict the ability of component providers within such a system to meet common deadlines simultaneously. The problem may be further compounded when the component providers are distributed around the entire world. Techniques that enable improvements in such mass customization production systems would have considerable utility.